I Never Thought I was so Popular

I've had a web site of wav files for several years. The site has over 200 HTML files associated with it, each of which represents one page of the site.

As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to keep track of site statistics.

I have tried placing counters on strategic pages to see what's what but have always been curious about the site in general. How are people getting to my site? Where are they coming from? Which pages are they actually visiting? And I've never been able to track that...

Until now.

Ron found a free site statistics service called StatCounter.

Several different statistics/counter services let you set up multiple counters but you have a unique code for each counter. That means, you have to prepare a counter for each page and place the code for the counter on the page you want to watch. Using that method, there is no cross-reference (or very little).

With StatCounter, you set up a project and place the same code on each page of the site you want to watch (somewhere between the body and /body tags). You can have a visible counter or not and you can even set up multiple projects. I, for instance, have StatCounter currently watching my blog (this page), my photo site, my celebrity photo site, and my wav site.

For each of those projects, StatCounter will show me the following:

• Summary - Total page loads and unique visitors over time
  
• Popular Pages - Which pages have been visited how many times and by whom
  
• Entry Pages - Which page did they land on when they first entered the site (was it the index page or a sub-page?)
  
• Exit Pages - Not too sure yet what this shows
  
• Came From - Referring sites/URLs
  
• Keyword Analysis - What keywords they used in their seraches to find the site
  
• Visitor Paths - How they moved through the site (from page A to page C to page F to page D, etc.)
  
• Visit Length - How long they stayed
  
• Returning Visits - Just set it up today so I don't have any return visitors yet
  
• Recent Pageload Activity - The most recent pages loaded in order of loading
  
• Country/State/City/Zip - Geographic information
  
• Browser - What browsers visitors are using
  
• system Stats - Visitor operating system, screen resolution, etc.
  

For most of these statistics, you can drill down and see specifically who did what how many times. It's pretty cool. The only drawback is it will only keep track of the last 100 events (except for overall count) on the free version.

Why is this a drawback? I set this up about 1:30pm local time on my wav site. It is now 4:42pm and the counter is showing 369 page loads and 109 unique visitors. The last 100 page loads have been from the US, Sweden, Germany and Canada. Earlier, it was showing hits from the United Kingdom and Singapore. And thats in the span of just over THREE HOURS!!

I had no idea my wav site was so popular.